Success Story – Title I’s Targeted Funding Formula
As Congress continues to consider the reauthorization
of the No Child Left Behind Act (“NCLB”),
the key debates have focused on policy issues such as
testing, teaching quality, and accountability, but little
attention has been given to the distribution of funds,
which have increased over 40% since 2001. Significant
changes in the allocation of funds for Title I, the
largest program category under the Act, were adopted
as part of the NCLB revisions. “The increase in
targeting of federal aid in NCLB is a success story
that nobody knows about,” stated Michael Dannenberg,
director of the education policy program for the New
America Foundation.
Title I provides districts with large grants to improve
programming for disadvantaged students. The purpose
of title I is to provide money to assist districts in
meeting the needs of economically disadvantaged students.
Before NCLB, the government allocated Title I funds
through basic grants to almost every school district
and concentration grants to districts with more than
fifteen percent of enrolled students eligible for Title
I services. However, NCLB has changed the way the $12.8
billion of Title I funds are distributed by targeting
aid to districts with high concentrations of disadvantaged
students, based on either the total number or the total
percentage of Title I eligible students.
Under the current formula, districts with large numbers
of disadvantaged students, which generally are large
cities and suburban districts with areas of concentrated
poverty, benefit the most. Schools in urban districts
like NYC and in suburban districts like Montgomery County,
Maryland have gained substantially from Title I increases.
Correspondingly, Title I allocations for districts with
low concentrations of poverty have been substantially
reduced. A report by the Center for Education Policy
(CEP) finds that in some low poverty districts, Title
I funding has fallen by over 40 percent sine 2001. According
to education consultant, Charles Barone, these districts
“do fine under their own property-tax structures”
and they use local money to make up for the loss in
federal aid.
A number of advocates for rural schools claim, however,
that the new formula does not treat their students fairly.
Marty Strange, policy director for the Rural School
and Community Trust, argues that the option to calculate
Title I allocations based on absolute numbers of students
works to the advantage of districts with large numbers
of poverty students that generally choose this option
because the average per pupil weighting increases as
the number of poverty students increases. In other words,
a large urban or suburban district that has the same
concentration of poverty ( i.e. the same proportion
of its total school population being disadvantaged)
as a small rural area will be entitled to much higher
weightings than a small rural district with the same
poverty concentration. Strange says that students in
rural areas “are being penalized because they
are not herded into one place.” He claims there
is an “an anti-rural and anti-small [district]
bias” in the law.
Prepared by Marcela Briceno January 7, 2008
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